Paul Sedra, Robert Springborg, Joshua Stacher, Adam Sabra, and Elliott Colla

Paul Sedra is Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University, and Middle East editor of the Wiley-Blackwell journal, History Compass.  He has taught at Dalhousie University and the University of Toronto, and has published articles in Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations, Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, the Journal of Religious History, as well as the Middle East working paper series of Yale and Columbia Universities.  The principal focus of his research is the social and cultural history of the modern Middle East.  His most recent book, From Mission to Modernity: Evangelicals, Reformers and Education in Nineteenth-Century Egypt, was published by I.B. Tauris earlier this year.  In the book, Sedra examines the connections between education and the rise of the modern state in nineteenth-century Egypt. Paul is a Contributing Editor of the Pedagogy Page at Jadaliyya.

Robert Springborg is a Professor in the Department of National Security Affairs of the Naval Postgraduate School and Program Manager for the Middle East for the Center for Civil-Military Relations. Until August, 2008 he held the MBI Al Jaber Chair in Middle East Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, where he also served as Director of the London Middle East Institute. Before taking up that Chair he was Director of the American Research Center in Egypt. From 1973 until 1999 he taught in Australia, where he was University Professor of Middle East Politics at Macquarie University. He has also taught at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Pennsylvania and elsewhere.  

Joshua Stacher is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Kent State University. Dr. Stacher is the author of Adaptable Autocrats: Regime Power in Egypt and Syria, which will be published by Stanford University Press in April 2012. His research articles have appeared in Middle East Journal, History Compass, Arab Studies Quarterly, and The British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies. Stacher is also on the editorial board of MERIP. He has made media appearances and written commentary for NPR, CNN, BBC, Al-Jazeera English, Foreign Affairs, andJadaliyya, among others. He is also a founding member of the Northeast Ohio Consortium on Middle East Studies (NOCMES). His website can be found here.

Adam Sabra is Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara and holds the King Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud Chair in Islamic Studies. His research focuses on the social and cultural history of Egypt in the late medieval and early modern periods. He is the author of Poverty and Charity in Medieval Islam: Mamluk Egypt, 1250 - 1517 (Cambridge U. P., 2000), and numerous other studies on Egyptian history. His current research focuses on aristocratic families in Ottoman Cairo.

Elliott Colla is author of Conflicted Antiquities: Egyptology, Egyptomania, Egyptian Modernity (Duke University Press, 2007), and translator of works of Arabic literature, including Ibrahim Aslan's The Heron, Idris Ali's Poor, and Al-Koni's Gold Dust. He is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Georgetown University.